Paradox. Alex Archer

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      ANNJA HEADED OUT OF the television studio building into warm autumn sunlight. Some dried leaves skittered along the steps.

      It was a little after one. She had two full hours for lunch before she was due back for a script conference for Chasing History’s Monsters on star-children—hybrids between creatures from the stars, which was an old-time way of saying aliens, and men. Some people claimed they were spoken of in legends from all over the world. Annja was almost as skeptical of that claim as she was of the alien-human hybrid thing itself. She knew that her show was fluff but it paid well and allowed her to do a lot of real archaeology that she’d never have the time or money for otherwise. And now Doug was promising to let her shape an episode entirely her way. He’d been hounding her all morning to accept the Noah’s Ark expedition. It seemed Charlie Bostitch was throwing his weight and his money around and he really wanted Annja on his team.

      Annja had no idea what she was going to do for lunch. But after a morning of Doug and his antics she just had to get away from the show and everything connected to it for a while. Even if she just walked aimlessly the whole time. Actually, even if she stood banging her forehead against the corner of a building.

      Her phone rang. She pulled it from its carrier. The number was unfamiliar. She thumbed Answer anyway. What the hey? She was an adventuress, wasn’t she?

      “Ms. Creed?” asked a man in a slightly Middle Eastern accent.

      “Yes,” she said in a neutral tone. Irrationally she started flicking her eyes all around, studying the slow-moving tourist swarms and the busy locals bustling past them with their usual welcoming snarls and occasional shouted obscenities. If anyone was stalking her they probably wouldn’t need to resort to a trick like dialing her number and seeing who answered. But she also had a well-honed aversion to taking things for granted.

      “I hope you will forgive me bothering you. This is Levi.”

      “Levi?”

      “Rabbi Leibowitz. I met you last night at dinner at the Penthouse.”

      “Oh. Yes. Rabbi. How are you?” Politeness, her default mode, took over. Very few people, herself definitely included, thought of her as a Southerner, although to all practical purposes she was, having been raised in New Orleans. She was a New Yorker through and through. She was most particularly not a Southern belle. But the sisters at the orphanage had brought her up to be polite, and on the whole, she was pleased with that. Unlike a great many other elements of her upbringing.

      “Oh, I’m fine, fine, Ms. Creed. And I’m terribly sorry if I or my associates offended you last night.”

      “No. I wouldn’t say offended is the word.” She could think of plenty others. But gratuitous meanness didn’t form a major component of her personality. She liked to think, anyway. Besides, there was something about the rabbi’s halting voice that struck a chord inside her. A quality of vulnerability. Of innocence.

      “But not too favorably impressed.”

      “Well…not with your associates. To be perfectly candid with you, Rabbi Leibowitz, I hate to think of myself as giving in to guilt by association. That said—given that you chose to surround yourself with such associates, and their project—I formed a certain impression of you. I apologize if I judged you unfairly. I guess I’m as subject to human frailties as anybody.”

      He laughed. “Oh, don’t say that, Ms. Creed. And please don’t judge the men you met with me last night too harshly. They are good men, whatever their enthusiasms.”

      “It’s good men I’ve learned to fear most in the world, Rabbi. Especially the enthusiastic ones. Look, I’m willing to admit I may have judged you too hastily. I apologize for that. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

      “Please, Ms. Creed.” His voice pulsed with urgency. “Hear me out. I’m not really concerned…with your opinion of me. But I think it would be a great tragedy if you passed on participating in this project without hearing certain aspects of it that, that maybe got glossed over last night. And I’d like to ask you, as a favor to me, even though you certainly don’t owe me anything, if you would at least examine my credentials online. I’m not in fact a colleague of yours, strictly speaking—I’m no archaeologist, naked or otherwise.”

      She had to laugh at that.

      “I am an antiquarian, a historian, a scholar of ancient languages. I believe this expedition could add significantly to the sum of human historical and cultural knowledge.”

      “Let me ask you flat out,” she said. “Do you believe in the literal truth of Genesis?”

      His laugh sounded incredulous. A lot like she figured hers would have sounded if faced with the same question. “Oh, certainly not, Ms. Creed. Very few educated Jews today believe any such thing. Certainly few serious scholars, of which I flatter myself I’m one. But I ask, does that mean there cannot be something there, on that frightening mountain surrounded by very frightening people, that could still be worth unearthing?”

      She felt her pulse quickening. The old atavistic joy of the hunt. Sneaking into eastern Turkey, in the heart of a war zone, and climbing to a mountain height where no official expedition had been allowed—it was hard to resist a challenge like that.

      “All right, Rabbi,” she said. “I haven’t bought into this yet. But I gather you have a pitch for me. I’m willing to hear it. All right?”

      “Oh, that’s wonderful, Ms. Creed. Thank you so much. Are you free for lunch?”